Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.

Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.

Well, you could argue that some people do altruistic acts because it rewards them with a good feeling, similar to how others feel good about amassing money or power or being desired, so ultimately egoistic motivation. The trick is to have a culture and organization of society that makes the best out of peoples different egoistic motivations.

You always get that in the first 5 minutes of an economics course (to theoretically cover their ass), and then the rest of course is about money. They don't really have any way to verify, measure, or make predictions based on that piece of dogma.

A brain that rewards itself with a "good feeling" whenever it takes actions that benefit others without an overt reciprocal benefit is, by any useful definition, an "altruistic brain."

Saying "you get a good feeling and therefore you are selfish," is silly, since there is a clear difference between a "selfish" person who exploits the poor and a "selfish" (sic) person who gives generously to the poor.

I didn't call it selfish, I called it an ultimately egoistic motivation. And there clearly is a reciprocal benefit, if you tear yourself lose from the materialistic focus. And there are lots of egoistic motivations that guide our behavior that have nothing to do with exploiting the poor. Fx. to be liked, to be well respected, to be desired, to be looked up to, etc.

Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.

lol, yeah, I remember him. I also remember doing jaeger shots at the geek compound with Eric "Surprised by Wealth" Raymond. IIRC, that night he was surprised by tacosnotting. I haven't vomitted that hard, before or since.

Ah yes, blame "the West". Of course the East has been a bastion of wisdom, equality and selfless generosity for a long time now. The South did not fare so well, being too busy being sold off by the West into slavery, which the West invented of course.

Not quite true - there are some people out there with genuinely altruistic motivations. It's just that the West has managed to make a religion out of selfishness, so they're few and far between, and often lambasted.

Uncle Ben summed it up. With great power comes great responsibility. The wiki, once it gathered power, stopped being responsible to the people and instead decided to cash in.

This is what happens in a capitalistic world. Shit, it happened here. A corporation bought out the owners of slashdot and now we are having a problem between how slashdot has been and how they want to change it (slashdot beta). The corp only cares about money. When you have something successful like the wiki, corporations s

Any site claiming so is lying. The owners want mindshare and eyeballs, i.e. you. You are the ultimate product despite whatever you may believe about a site. The owners how to get a large enough audience to get noticed by a bigger player, who them will come in and buy the business. The owners leave to live a happy wealthy life, the users, bitch and moan as normal.

My sites free. I pay to host it. Anyones free to go there, download my content. I've no intention of ever applying ANY license to any of it. You can even use it for commercial purposes if you like. I don't care. If you want to be nice you should throw in an attribution though.

and no, I'm not going to provide a link. I'd prefer to be able to continue to rant on Slashdot with pseudo-anonymity:-D

My sites free. I pay to host it. Anyones free to go there, download my content. I've no intention of ever applying ANY license to any of it. You can even use it for commercial purposes if you like. I don't care. If you want to be nice you should throw in an attribution though.

The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. See Other Information below.

However, that doesn't really address any of the issues that GP raised.

IANAL either, but generally speaking, a "licensing agreement" is a contract. And again generally speaking, one is not allowed to change the terms of a contract and make them "retroactive". At least not without the consent of all parties involved. If you did, it would no longer meet the very definition of "contract".

I mean, just think about it. Could your cable company say "We're going to make you a 'retroactive' customer and charge you for all past years as well"??? Of course not.

Your post raises some interesting questions I don't see addressed elsewhere in this thread:

Every user-content-driven site presumably has terms of service which dictate how your contributions can be used. For example, let's say you upload a picture to be used on a UserContentEncyclopedia.com article and you specify the license. UserContentEncyclopedia.com then changes their ToS to say anyone who contributes content to UserContentEncyclopedia.com henceforth or in the past grants them a waiver to use it for commercial purposes, regardless of the terms of the license originally granted.

1. If the ToS also says, "your use of this site signifies your acceptance of these terms", how do you signify that you don't accept? Never visit the site again?2. If you never "use" the site again, will UserContentEncyclopedia.com realize this, and refrain from using your past contributions commercially since you haven't signified acceptance of the terms? Or will UserContentEncyclopedia.com assume that the continued presence of your past contributions constitutes "use"?3. Does any site with ToS actually keep track of which registered users have accepted updated ToS?4. Have ToS clauses such as (1) ever been tested in court, and judged to form the basis of a legally binding contract?5. What if I don't accept the implied contract that merely visiting a website constitutes acceptance of its ToS?6. Could someone use the reasoning in (5) to claim they don't accept the implied contract that signing their name on a physical paper contract constitutes acceptance of the terms therein?

1. If the ToS also says, "your use of this site signifies your acceptance of these terms", how do you signify that you don't accept? Never visit the site again?
2. If you never "use" the site again, will UserContentEncyclopedia.com realize this, and refrain from using your past contributions commercially since you haven't signified acceptance of the terms? Or will UserContentEncyclopedia.com assume that the continued presence of your past contributions constitutes "use"?
3. Does any site with ToS actually keep track of which registered users have accepted updated ToS?
4. Have ToS clauses such as (1) ever been tested in court, and judged to form the basis of a legally binding contract?
5. What if I don't accept the implied contract that merely visiting a website constitutes acceptance of its ToS?
6. Could someone use the reasoning in (5) to claim they don't accept the implied contract that signing their name on a physical paper contract constitutes acceptance of the terms therein?

These are some very good points; you should at least get an account so that they start at a Score of +1 or +2 instead of 0, and are more likely to be seen.

IANAL either, but generally speaking, a "licensing agreement" is a contract. And again generally speaking, one is not allowed to change the terms of a contract and make them "retroactive". At least not without the consent of all parties involved. If you did, it would no longer meet the very definition of "contract".

Well, an EULA is a contract. Courts have upheld that the terms of an EULA can be changed arbitrarily by the ones who issued it.

Well, an EULA is a contract. Courts have upheld that the terms of an EULA can be changed arbitrarily by the ones who issued it.

Not only is that a very gross generalization, it is untrue in almost all cases.

First off, a EULA is a license agreement for use of a product. ToS is for a service. That's not nitpicking, it is in fact an extremely important difference.

I studied EULAs rather extensively in Business Law at university. Their history is interesting and also legally very important. As it turns out, EULAs have been tried by the manufacturers and distributors for just about every kind of product in existence. There was even

I wasn't aware of TV Tropes' attempt to change the licensing terms a couple of years back. Had I known, I would already have had a contemptious view of them (since *my* first thought too was that "you can't simply (legally) relicense CC content under new terms unless the contributors agree or you make it clear"- and, as the article writer pointed out, no such terms were presented or agreed to by me when adding edits.)

Even so, I was already unimpressed with a trick I caught them using a couple of months or

bereave[bih-reev]verb (used with object), bereaved or bereft, bereaving.1. to deprive and make desolate, especially by death (usually followed by of ): Illness bereaved them of their mother.2. to deprive ruthlessly or by force (usually followed by of ): The war bereaved them of their home.3. Obsolete. to take away by violence.

No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent.This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional p

This applies only if contributors provide their contributions under the License. TV Tropes Foundation now claims that contributors provide provide their contributions not under the License but instead under assignment of copyright: "By contributing content to this site, whether text or images, you grant TV Tropes irrevocable ownership of said content, with all rights surrendered" except for fair use. So TV Tropes Foundation becomes the copyright owner, and it licenses your edits back to you under the License.

In the US, a copyright assignment is not valid unless done in writing. (Google up copyright assignment writing, for instance http://www.copyrightcodex.com/... [copyrightcodex.com] ). So either tvtropes is clueless, or that doesn't mean what you think it means.

TV Tropes Foundation NOW claims that contributors provide provide their contributions not under the License but instead under assignment of copyright

It does it now, but it didn't do it then. That's the core of the matter at both Wikia and TV Tropes. The large majority of both websites was only contributed to them under a Creative Commons license.

So either tvtropes is clueless,

TV Tropes is clueless. They made the license change because they discovered that someone had created a (partial) fork [wikiindex.org], and were outraged when they learned that they couldn't legally put it down. Since then, another fork has been created [wikiindex.org] containing the complete content of the last version released unambiguously as CC-BY-SA in summer 2012, including all the content that was censored because of Google Ads. It's a fascinating story, really.

In the US, a copyright assignment is not valid unless done in writing.

True, but now I want to see how copyright law determines whether "an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent." I take "in writing" to refer to being "fixed in a tangible medium", such as anything stored in the server's access log or a user properties table. And if clicking something amounting to "I agree to these terms" on the get known page doesn't constitute "signed", this wo

Clicking something amounting to "I agree to these terms" may very well be legally binding, but it didn't happen in those sites. They were careless enough not to provide such wording either in their post forms nor their Terms of Use.

and i bet there was a clause in the original license saying they can change it any time they want

How would that be possible? Only the copyright holder can change the license under which their copyrighted works can be used. Now this site seems to have added terms to their site that claim "by using our site, you give up any restriction that your content cannot be used for commercial uses". That has at least big, big problems. First obviously copyrighted works by people using the site at some point in the past, but not anymore. Using such content is obvious copyright infringement since the copyright holde

Wrong. Since the website doesn't have permission under copyright law to use the content, the only thing that allows Wikia to publish content they didn't create is the license under which editors have given them such permission. Users *are* licensing the content to the service under the CC-BY-NC license - they're contributing to a derivative work published under that license, so the combined work must be under the license per the terms of the CC.

So the "willingly giving" of content was provided under a very specific license, which is the reason why many users bother to contribute at all. Not honoring the license is not only morally wrong, it's also illegal.

And the legal opinion there was that to switch licenses would require the approval of every copyright holder.

+1; the Linux kernel was not the only high-profile real-life case of a FOSS project doing just that. I'm actually surprised GP apparently didn't knew of that; it received ample coverage on this very site.

You'd better as hell request an explicit permission to distribute the code from any contributor to your code base, and clarify in the post forms the conditions under which any contribution can be used.

what they actually did was contribute to a codebase - a codebase under my control, and one that I can slap any which license on that I like.

Utterly wrong. Under copyright laws, you can only relicense content that you created, or for which you've been given explicit ownership permissions; if Somebody gave you the code only under the original GPL and didn't assign copyright to you, in order to relicense the code you must first remove any such contribution, so that the result only contains the parts you wrote - otherwise, you'll break their copyright.

This is what is going on in both wikis - the only license under which they published their work at first was the CC-BY-SA (or CC-BY-NC for some Wikias), which is the reason for the sites becoming popular in the first place as many users wouldn't bother to contribute under more restrictive licenses; and neither site requested ownership rights until recently.

Did Somebody actually give me code under the GPL - or did they just... give me code? At which point, should one assume it is just a gift (which you can do with as you please), that it was implied that it would be under the GPL because the project it's intended for is under the GPL, or that in fact I couldn't do anything with that code other than as stipulated in any particular communication surroundin

Did you get that in writing? If not, don't treat it as a gift. If you include it in the GPL code without explicit permission, you may taint the whole project. In fact, many people contribute to FLOSS and Open Knowledge projects with the explicit expectation that it won't be relicensed, and we refrain from contributing to such projects without those guarantees - so yes, there's a strong expectation that contributing to a GPL project is done under GPL terms and no others. The GPL was explicitly designed with

That's interesting. There is a difference between emailing the code to the maintainer and having them put it into the repository, versus getting check-in privileges and updating the repository yourself. Doing it through a web interface makes it very ambiguous though. I could see arguments both ways.

Ultimately, it just needs to be stated clearly which model the site is using so people know what they are getting into.

As far as I can tell, unless you have a copyright assignment from the person who wrote the copyrighted material, there is no reason to think you would have ownership of the copyrighted material. This is why many companies that operate in such a model make you go through a process to become a contributer.

Just e-mailing something to someone doesn't assign them copyright, and I think that sort of thing was decided long ago with mailing manuscripts.

However, the "Commercial Use Waiver" still allows Wikia any form of commercial use for any derivative work.

There was in the Forum [memory-alpha.org] a proposal to change the wording and "make it clear that the scope and purpose of the waiver is for the placement of ads", however that clarification never arrived to the LIcensing page. What happened to those good intentions?

Or include a copyright assignment in the fine print on the submission terms - if you own the copyright on contributions then you can do whatever you want, contributor wishes be damned. I really hope that isn't what happened here.

"By contributing content to this site, whether text or images, you grant TV Tropes irrevocable ownership of said content, with all rights surrendered" in the welcome page [tvtropes.org] looks an awful lot like an assignment of copyright.

Unless you transferred copyright you absolutely can - if you licensed content under the CC-BY-NC then only *you* can change the license terms, and Wikia is acting illegally if it uses your content in a commercial setting. You don't have *exclusive* rights to collaborative content, but unless they strip out *everything* you contributed they can't relicense without your permission. That's one of the reasons that Linux, for example, is firmly committed to GPLv2 - Linus stripped out the "or any later version"

This is exactly the problem with "NC". To you, this is "clear commercial use". Is it because a big company is involved? Two companies? We assume money is changing hands, but... maybe it's not. The license says "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation". What if the money goes towards "supporting the community"? What exactly is "commercial advantage" in this context? I'd have to ask a lawyer, and... unless I was paying them to advise on a specific case, I doubt they'd actually give a straight answer.

Overall, "noncommercial" licenses are problematic and should be avoided. I understand the intention, but it's hard to make a license that actually gets there.

For a change, I need to agree with Sony (and you) on this one. Whether or not this infringes on "NC" really depends on exactly what they've done with it.

Do they simply display it in a browser-like interface, while preserving the essential webpageyness of the content? If so, I'd call that no more "noncommercial" than using Internet Explorer on Windows to visit Wikia directly. If, however, they've completely butchered the content to fit their marketing department's retarded whims and removed any traces of attribution in the process, that clearly goes well beyond grey area.

We've already accepted that every TV will eventually function as a more-or-less fully capable streaming media center; we also need to accept the implications of that on exactly the present issue. If device-X has a web browser, does device-X need a special license to view any webpage not explicitly marked as free-for-all? And if so, why doesn't MSIE need the same license? What if the TV runs Win8 and actually displays the content in MSIE?

Merely allowing the site to be accessed through the product features is not commercial by itself, but if the links are included by default in a prominent place (and we know they will), that counts as product placement and branding; and it can definitely be considered a commercial purpose - people pay money to that kind of placement.

Merely allowing the site to be accessed through the product features is not commercial by itself, but if the links are included by default in a prominent place (and we know they will), that counts as product placement and branding; and it can definitely be considered a commercial purpose - people pay money to that kind of placement.

I'm not saying that this interpretation is necessarily wrong, but... it's quite wide in scope. It seems like you are saying that not only would hosting NC content on a site with ads be disallowed, but that merely prominently linking to such content from a site with ads would be disallowed, as would any advertising for any commercial software or hardware which implied that NC content could be accessed.

Furthermore, the suggestion that if some people sometimes pay for a particular activity, then all instances

I didn't suggest that activities activities which are sometimes done for money are always commercial.

I meant that activities for promoting commercial products should always be considered commercial (even if the promotion itself is not paid), as they're always intended to produce a sale; which is different.

I suspect that, if Sony was going to use the site, they realize most people will never update their TVs, so they had to have some assurances that the site and its format, API, etc... would remain the same. Why would wikia agree to that? Oh sure Sony, out of the kindness of our hearts we'll maintain this in-perpetuity for you! No... Sony's giving them money to maintain the site in the certain way. It's clearly commercial.

Now that the wiki and Sony partnership is formed think of the benefits copywriters will gain from the feature of TV commercials included for their content. Furthermore their reach is also going to expand dramatically if the Tv Commercial part becomes successful on a grand scale. But not everything just as planned Lets see what happens.

That BMW looks pretty nice and hosting free shit for free doesn't pay for a BMW. I wish these companies would be more honest about it when they finally do decide to fuck everyone over, though. Really, how hard is it to say "Yeah, we decided we wanted a BMW"? Or "Yeah, our CEO needs a fifth house." or "We're firing all those guys because our CEO is planning to cash out a fuck-ton of stock options this year and wants three million dollars instead of two." Since no one has any privacy anymore anyway, they may as well be honest about their reasons. It's not like we won't find out a couple months later anyway.

People who don't own their own businesses or aren't involved in the higher levels of a corporation don't realize that much of business behavior is defined by the expectation of the likelihood of being sued.

Of course they can't legally just retroactively f*** everyone over, but who is going to stop them when they're likely privately indemnified by SONY.

That's just one of the negatives of capitalism - most people try to get away with everyth

Iv'e added a retroactive clause to my browser the supersedes the Wikia and Tropes copyright claims that says I own all the content I create through that browser and do not surrender any copyright when I add content to a wiki, wikia, message board, facebook or any other website.

See, you may actually have found the solution to the problem. If you put that in your User Agent, it will be recorded in their server logs, and they can't claim that it can't be applied retroactively without invalidating their own terms.